My first VMworld..

As this was my first VMworld I am not ashamed to say I was really stoked about attending, many of my peers have attended in the past and were going to attend.

I flew in on the Sunday evening so that I could register early on Monday for partner day, however I did miss the chance to attend what turned out to be a very popular and very full Rockstar event on the Sunday evening.

The first thing that struck me was the size of the venue in short it was huge and even with VMworld running the conference center had room to spare. Registration was a simple affair the staff were very helpful when i had a few queries regarding my pass, being the nerd I am I was keen to collect my rucksack and make good use of it.

I then made my way directly to the bloggers area and the HOL which did not disappoint, I immediately ran into a few familiar faces from twitter and this became a running theme all week, it really was fantastic to finally get the chance to meet so many ‘tweeps’.

A few of us (courtesy of VMUG) were given a tour of the HOL area with great explanations from lab team leads on how and why they ran them and the history of how it came to be. It was also quite cool to note that 1 of the two datacenters running the labs was using EVO:RAIL.

In the hang out area there were huge projected screens that displayed social media streams from the attendee’s (pictures and tweets). It was also great to watch the vBrownbag sessions live through out the week! Another thing I was impressed with was the Wi-Fi cudos to the guys who set this up it worked flawlessly all week even when the venues were very busy.

The solutions exchange was great! Plenty of very well known vendors and many I not heard of before, I took deliberate time to visit the EVO:RAIL rooms and finally got to see the vendor hardware on display. I spent some time on the VMUG stand hanging out with and helping the team there and slightly harras @commsninja from the engineers unplugged stand, finally it was great to see and catch up with the guys from PernixData!

All in all it was a fantastic time and I am looking forward to going next year! I shall leave you with a few more pics that I took..